17 ms·

We Regulate the Wrong Things

• megaman8 8y ago
  It's sad but some people are so immensely lazy, they'd rather circle the block in an SUV 10 times than walk 5 steps. So, when such people are asked to produce regulations: the results are predictable.
  • agumonkey 8y ago
    Not sure the regulators are part of the group you describe. That sounds more like teenagers.
    • Retra 8y ago
      Plenty of adults do it too. I'm reminded of this every time I go shopping with someone who objects that I did not find a closer parking space. And I have to point out that it would take more time and fuel to go to the closer space than it would be to walk from where I parked to that space. These are just people who don't walk enough outside to know how long it takes to walk places. They're trying to maximize efficiency in a rather horrible way.
      • agumonkey 8y ago
        Oh that is a whole another issue. Which is nonetheless true.
• pitaj 8y ago
  I'm pretty sure that having no zoning regulations in addition to allowing business and residence in the same building would improve a lot. Who doesn't want to live above a grocery store?
  • svachalek 8y ago
    This sounds sarcastic but I'm having a hard time connecting it to the article. Where does it propose anything like this?
  • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
    I'd love to see more of that residential / service mix... I would not, however, want my neighbours to run a tannery, nor would I care for a payday loan office next door.
    • Thriptic 8y ago
      This is my exact situation. I live across the street from two auto repair shops and it is spectacularly annoying to be woken up early in the morning by people blowing horns, grinding metal, or having inventory replenished by loud trucks. I am fully in favor of mixed development and would love to live above a coffee shop, restaurant, bodega, retail store etc. I am not in favor of living next to a place where assembly or manufacturing is taking place (or any other industrial behavior). Either the type of business needs to be somewhat regulated or the hours in which commerce can occur need to be better regulated to encourage people to do things like replenishing inventory in the evening as opposed to early in the morning.
      • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        >spectacularly annoying to be woken up early in the morning If by early you mean "slightly before the start of bushiness hours". Nobody is waking up at 6am to turn wrenches at 7. Yeah, I guess if they start up at 7-8am that puts a damper on your ability to sleep in until 9 on weekdays but is that really something you find yourself wanting to do all that often? An automotive shop sounds a heck of a lot better than any establishment that is open late. I say this as someone who lives baseball throwing distance from a small business that maintains a fleet of excavators and trucks. If you live in a relatively developed area something is going to be making noise, garbage trucks, delivery trucks, nearby construction, etc.
        • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
          Most shops I know open at 7:30, which seems reasonable on a Wednesday, but super obnoxious Saturday morning if they start work before their official opening.
        • 8y ago
  • TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Is this really a rule in some areas? In Asia this is a really typical thing. Somebody will live upstairs and downstairs run an internet cafe, convenient mart, grocery store, or whatever else. Makes it really easy to open up a business as well. Knock out your lower floor's front wall, put a sign up, you're in business! It's also nice for people in the neighborhood when there's a coffee shop, grocery store, etc within like a 200m walk.
    • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
      In the UK it's quite rare for people to run a retail business out of their home, I can see why we don't do this but I also have a feeling we miss out on a lot as well.
      • nicoburns 8y ago
        It isn't common now, but was until recently. Most high street shops have flats above them (except in the centres of big cities), and many are still owned by the same people who run the shop.
      • rleigh 8y ago
        In the town I grew up in (Blackburn), all the traditional family-run shops in terraced streets had the shop on the front room on the ground floor, and the living room and kitchen at the back, bedrooms on the top floor. Bakeries, butchers, delicatessens, shoe shops, chip shops, fashion shops, habadasheries, newsagencies, hardware shops, electrical shops, everything was like this. This was typical of most towns until the mid-late 1980s. You could do all your shopping on a single street local to your house. These were not supermarket-style shops. You would walk in and be served directly over the counter in most. It's a shame that this was all destroyed by big supermarkets and globalism, because the quality of the products and service was superb, and they all sold locally produced food and goods, supporting a lot of local economic activity rather than having massive supply chains to source everything from China. The staff weren't minimum wage and disinterested, they were experts in their fields who cared about their businesses and customers, and had pride in their jobs and skills. Their destruction is one of the reasons why so many of our towns are struggling.
  • Spivak 8y ago
    If you're building an apartment complex in a metro area you'll already have no trouble putting stores on the bottom. We have this everywhere and all new construction is going this way as well.
    • masklinn 8y ago
      Older urban areas are grandfathered in, but a lot of the US follows an exclusive, euclidian (after the city of Euclid) zoning model, especially for the suburbs: an area is either commercial or residential and there is no distinction between types & nuisance of businesses at that level of zoning.
  • borkt 8y ago
    Mixed use is precisely what zoning regulations are pushing for these days. If there were no zoning laws developers would only build whatever makes them the most money (from what I gather this may be mini-storage in all honesty). Edit: also elder care. I see developers do all sorts of less than honest things to win the approval to make an elder care facility.
    • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      It's my understanding that self storage (and in some places, paid parking) are basically a low up front cost way to break even. It's basically a way to cover your taxes and make a small profit while you hope that land values go up.
    • mikeash 8y ago
      I used to live in a new mixed-use development. The builders built as much of the residential parts as the county would allow, and then basically quit. It's been the better part of a decade now and the place still doesn't include a single office or retail unit. A huge chunk of land just sits empty. I'm certain that if the county stepped out and allowed the developers do what they wanted, that land would instantly be filled with even more residential units and that would be it. (And given the demand for housing, that may not be a bad thing, but the result isn't mixed-use.)
      • borkt 8y ago
        That is definitely true. I work on the infrastructure/engineering side of municipal government but I have worked on the private side in companies that also do land planning. Developers always promise anything the city wants in order to get approval for a tentative map, then phase the construction. Phase 1 residential goes in and gets certificate of occupancy, next day "phase 1 went way over budget, we just cant do it right now." Not all developments go this way but a lot do. I am always very careful to structure conditions in such a way that they at are obliged to construct all public infrastructure and as much of the development as I possibly can prior to giving them public works signoff.
        • 8y ago
  • cynicalkane 8y ago
    That's normal in a lot of cities, including New York. The answer is that the apartment above the grocery store is an apartment for someone who would have lived in a place less desirable to them otherwise.
    • watwut 8y ago
      Grocery store downstairs is quite practical with little to no downside. Why does everyone assumes parent was sarcastic?
      • cimmanom 8y ago
        Probably the "Who wouldn't" phrasing. That said, having lived above a restaurant, I personally will never again live in a building shared with a food-related business. Even the cleanest tend to have a poor record controlling pests; and when they exterminate, all the critters will flee into your apartment. A grocery store a couple doors down on the same block, though? Ideal. Pharmacy on the ground floor of my building? Absolutely. Shoe store? Jewelry store? Toy store? Hairdresser? Why the hell not? Many of the most popular neighborhoods in New York are built out like this. The convenience is part of what makes them so popular.
      • InitialLastName 8y ago
        > with little to no downside The cockroaches are a downside, as are the bottle deposit machines running (and crunching glass) at all hours, but you're mostly right.
        • watwut 8y ago
          That is not typical of grocery stores I know. None has glass crunching machine, only few run whole night and there are no cockroaches around.
  • plants 8y ago
    No zoning is also how you get a city like Houston where there are churches next to skyscrapers next to liquor stores in downtown and sprawling strip malls for miles everywhere else
    • zjaffee 8y ago
      Houston has zoning though in the form of very high parking requirements, and it's exactly why there are sprawling strip malls for miles. A better example of what a city without zoning would look like is New York (since most of the buildings were built before modern zoning locked what was there historically in place), but especially the tenement districts of the lower east side.
      • nikanj 8y ago
        Manhattan has churches next to skyscrapers next to liquor stores, and nobody seems too bothered
        • Dirlewanger 8y ago
          Because you don't need a car to get to most places. Houston is the antithesis of NYC in terms of urban planning.
    • orangecat 8y ago
      And that works better than you might expect. You'll probably need a car, but the places you need to regularly go are nearby so you don't spend a lot of time in traffic, and housing is cheap enough so that you'll likely be able to live close to work.
  • baddox 8y ago
    I get the point of your sarcasm, but is a grocery store really a great example? It doesn't seem that living above a grocery store would be that bad. Quite the opposite, in fact. I lived next door to a grocery store in San Francisco for several years, and there were also several floors of apartments in the same building above the grocery store. Surely a better example would be a night club or a coal plant.
    • pitaj 8y ago
      I wasn't actually being sarcastic. I'd actually love to live above a grocery store.
      • Baeocystin 8y ago
        I used to live less than 100' from a small grocery store and it was awesome. I really missed that proximity once I moved and had to drive to the store again. It was a genuine timesaver.
        • SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
          Me too. I was ok paying the premium if I could run across the street for some flour and eggs. It was one of the reasons we chose to live where we did, though naturally it closed down shortly after we signed the mortgage.
        • josephv 8y ago
          I agree, when I lived close to a grocer it was amazing and that is the absolute biggest thing I miss being a suburbanite. Beer runs were so much less complicated and my neighbors annoy me so I could avoid borrowing the proverbial cup of sugar. I've thought I should open a suburban bodega right in the neighborhood. But with lot sizes being fairly large and households being fairly small, i doubt I would get enough traffic since I couldn't compete with discount grocers and Walmart. C'est la vie, I bought a muscly convertible to enjoy these interstitial commutes.
      • xahrepap 8y ago
  • TomK32 8y ago
    You should even work there! At least according to this song https://3pod.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-of-happiness https://3pod.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-of-happiness
  • zjaffee 8y ago
    It absolutely depends on the layout of the building and the sort of grocery store at hand. Proper building codes and zoning can prevent that same grocery store from being able to engage in certain practices that would negatively impact the health and security of those living in the building above. Should there be an industrial kitchen in the grocery store, zoning and building codes are used to insure that should there be a fire, it won't impact those living above, even though it absolutely increases the cost of construction (and sets minimums on what the cost of housing is).
  • function_seven 8y ago
    I would kill to have a grocery store just a stair walk or elevator ride away. Cooking dinner and forgot the onions? I could fix that problem in five minutes while the water is still coming up to a boil. (EDIT: I misread sarcasm in your comment. But my reply works the same either way :)
  • hoorayimhelping 8y ago
    >Who doesn't want to live above a grocery store? People who don't like pests. People who don't like truck deliveries early in the morning or late at night. Grocery stores are a mild example and I get the point you're making, but there are downsides to living above one. I've met people who listed one of those reasons for not living above one when I lived in Brooklyn. It's mostly the pests though. I know a couple of people who lived above restaurants and grocery stores who said never again because of the amount of roaches that get into their place.
    • icebraining 8y ago
      Grocery stores on the lower floor of residential buildings is the norm here (I can think of five within walking distance) and I never heard people from those buildings complain about that. Restaurants yes, but even there I suspect it varies with the cleanliness of the place. Maybe there are building adaptations to reduce the problem, that stores in that area don't do?
      • sokoloff 8y ago
        Presumably, the people who elected to live in a building over a grocery store would be exactly the type of people who wouldn't later complain about it. This same principle doesn't seem to apply to people who buy cheap(er) houses near an existing airport, though...
  • nine_k 8y ago
    I lived right above a small grocery store for a few years. If anything, it was pretty easy to walk down an buy some daily food items. Certainly it's not the greatest option if what you value most is total quiet. But with that, a residential-only street frequented by cars is a bigger nuisance than a corner shop with very low car traffic around it (all parking was ~300ft away).
  • masklinn 8y ago
    You still need some zoning regulations: living above a grocery store is great (especially if it's 8-8 or 8-10 or some such, 24/7 would probably be less nice), living above a nightclub is hell.
  • danans 8y ago
    > I'm pretty sure that having no zoning regulations in addition to allowing business and residence in the same building would improve a lot. Assuming this is sarcasm, you don't need to have no zoning regulations. Existing zoning types like "residential mixed-use", which usually have restrictions on the type of businesses that can be operated within them, could be expanded. If the area is sparse enough, mixed-use could just be a business district you could walk to, not necessarily one right underneath you. > Who doesn't want to live above a grocery store? Again, assuming this is sarcasm. In many places, if the grocery store is clean and has things that the residents above actually want, a lot of people would like living above it - so much so that today, it's considered a "feature" of premium real estate and apartments in big city high-rises. Of course nobody wants to live above any poorly kept space. If a poorly kept space were to appear below your home, you have the option of moving to a place that isn't like that.
  • fwip 8y ago
    I live directly over a grocery store, and let me tell you, it's fantastic. The only problem is that the fire alarm goes off more often than normal, because of false alarms from the grocery store.
  • rauhl 8y ago
    > Who doesn't want to live above a grocery store? Years before I met her, my wife lived above a grocery store. She absolutely loved it: the entire store was effectively her fridge, and she didn’t need to get dressed for the outdoors to buy food. Listening to her talk about it, I really hope that we’re able to live above one together someday. This feels to me like a lot of urbanist stories: it really is nice, once one has experienced it.
    • qwertay 8y ago
      I imagine her food waste was next to none as things were purchased as needed rather than loosely planned for a week in the future.
  • gehwartzen 8y ago
    I work as a R&D Engineer in the armor industry and we have an applications lab in a small city in VA which I imagine has relatively lax zoning regulations. The lab is located in a large old tabaco processing warehouse and a few years back a developer bought half the building and put in apartments. Anyway not sure most residents even know where there but we have tons of hazardous chemicals at the site including drums of JP8 (jet fuel) stored outside near the “common areas”, giant totes of cyclohexane in a shed on the parking lot. Inside we also have a polymer production line where one has to wear anti static shoes and all the equipment doors are blast rated because of the explosive hazards. We also have a ballistics range in the building shooting up to .50 cal armor piercing rounds. We also have regular evac and containment drills in case something goes terribly wrong. This is all fine and good as I’m well aware of any risks working there but the residents a few walls removed might have a different opinion if they took a stroll through our facility. Point being, sometimes a few zoning regs can be a good thing ;)
• sbhn 8y ago
  People circle the block in there SUV 10 times, rather than walking, is because there main stream fear media is reminding them all the time that they are at risk of being knifed, or shot or beaten by random criminals all the time. And if there are police patrolling the streets, they are also likely to get harassed and questioned, or even suicided by cop. Sheesh, even security guards have the right to kill you with a choke hold. Drive your SUV to the end of the street, it’s safer.
  • nerdponx 8y ago
    Where in the USA do people think like this? I don't know anyone who does.
    • swiley 8y ago
      Most people I've been around think like this. So in Lynchburg and the very western suburban part of Richmond Virginia at least they do. Younger people who aren't in (have graduated) college seem to be a little more reasonable.
      • grandmczeb 8y ago
        I'm not sure if you have a very strange friend group, but I've never heard someone express a similar opinion.
        • swiley 8y ago
          I definitely do, it's not really a location thing.
      • eitally 8y ago
        <waves hi!> As a native Lynchburger who subsequently spent about 15 years in the Raleigh area before moving to San Jose a few years ago, ... I never felt this way growing up in Lynchburg. Yes, Lynchburg is approximately 50% white / 50% black, with approximately 0% any other ethnicity, and the majority of the white population is either exurbs or specific segregated parts of the city. But even though I grew up in Boonsboro I went to RS Payne Elementary downtown and then EC Glass for high school ... in HS, I freely wandered around that part of town after school (usually while waiting for sports practice of some sort). I never felt endangered. Nor, afaik, did my [mostly white] friends. That's a stupid anecdote, but I think it actually used to be better than it is now, and that mass & social media have created so much fearmongering that more people are hyper-insecure and wary of any unplanned interaction with anyone not in their in-group.
• jowiar 8y ago
  The one thing that this seems to miss, and for me what defines the "character" of a neighborhood as "walkable" or not, is how much of the space between buildings is for people vs. for cars. So many of the photos here have skinny sidewalks for people and fat roads for cars, and a space like that is never going to be full of people -- the sidewalk is a place "to get from here to there", not a place to be. Probably the best rule of thumb I've found is "Would I jaywalk here"? If an area is people-first, you have a lot of pedestrian traffic, little car traffic (because folks drive alternate routes), and what traffic there is travels at low speed. For car-first areas, it's a losing game of Frogger.
  • CydeWeys 8y ago
    Totally agreed. Even in Manhattan, where pedestrians vastly outnumber motorists, way more space is given over to driving and parking lanes than to sidewalk lanes. There are entire areas of the city that are known for severe sidewalk overcrowding during every single rush hour. Many European cities do a much better job of giving space to people instead of cars. We should do a better job of it here too.
    • jowiar 8y ago
      Yep — I’m a Manhattanite as well. It’s telling that when you intersect pedestrian-friendly with transit accessibility you end up with a list of the most expensive places to live in the US, even when the housing stock is mostly shit.
      • TheCoelacanth 8y ago
        AKA, you end up with one of the most desirable living locations in the world and people are willing to pay a fortune to live there.
    • mikeash 8y ago
      I love this drawing of how the streets look from a pedestrian's point of view, to really drive home how crazy it is. https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestrians-roads https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestria...
• masklinn 8y ago
  > “It’s too tall” is a common refrain in public hearings to approve new construction, but I’m honestly puzzled by the obsession with the notion of a building’s height as a measure of compatibility with its surroundings. I think the importance of height in and of itself is vastly overstated. That is true, height is often a bad proxy for some other quality you're looking for and which could be solved in original ways besides height e.g. in the north east you'd want enough light to reach the street and avoid gloomy alleys, besides height you could manage it by removing wedges of the building (from a basic cuboid shape), or having a front courtyard or a large atrium, or yes height. Height also becomes a factor of the street width, narrower streets would tend to get shorter buildings. Furthermore regulating height can be counter-productive: while you want to avoid excessive shade in the north-east, in the south-west you want to do the exact opposite, much like cities of northern africa or the middle east, for an arizonan or texan city to be walkable it needs shade and air flow rather than light: you need buildings tall enough that they protect pedestrians from the sun (without falling into gloom), but you also want them to guide and amplify the slightest breeze. > 3. Land Use > Segregation of uses is the most important of those features. The biggest factor that predicts walkability is the presence of actual destinations in walking distance of where people live. The postwar paradigm has been to rigidly control where commercial land uses can go and where they can’t, based on the premise that they are a nuisance in a residential neighborhood—bringing traffic, noise, and possibly crime. Yet all commercial uses are not created equal. Many places segregate by maximum nuisance rather than specific land use: plots are give an maximum nuisance level, and businesses are charted according to the expected nuisance they produce. Anything below the plot's MNL is allowed and thus your small corner shop or barbershop (low-nuisance businesses) can live in a "residential" area, but a nightclub or a machine shop probably can't.
  • graeme 8y ago
    I know Japan regulates by nuisance. Which other countries/cities do? It seems like a great system. My neighbourhood of Montreal has some of this, but I think a lot is grandfathered in. You can't just open anything you want in any building, even if there's a similar store around the block.
    • 8y ago
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  We shouldn't forget aesthetic and culture. Those things 'don't compute' into our secular views of productivity and equations ... but they are essential. All the little mouldings, trimmings, foliage, gardens, window sills, the brick, the cobblestone, the dishes, the wine. And I would add 'local people'. Expats and immigrants are good folk, but when everyone is a transplant, there's no rooted culture, and there's something missing. Nobody can agree on what should be what, and you end up with bland everything. Take for example many European cities have strong limits on building height etc. because to the locals, it's imperative, but in the new world, it's generally the opposite. The land in Stockholm is worth a lot, economically, it would make sense to just bulldoze everything and put up skyscrapers. Thank goodness that won't happen.
  • beat 8y ago
    I live in a 100 year old neighborhood. Over the past decade or so, there's been new construction - old houses with bad bones are torn down, and new ones built on their lots. But the new houses, try though they may, don't fit the aesthetic of the neighborhood very well. First, none of them use stucco, although stucco is by far the dominant surface material for older houses. It's too expensive for new. And while they have porches, they're made with these ridiculous oversized columns with plastic rocks and fake wood. And the windows! The side windows of our old bungalows are elegantly symmetric. The new ones have the rococo randomness of mcmansions in their windows. They just don't look right at all. Then again, in 50 more years, who knows?
    • sonnyblarney 8y ago
      Not only is the utter cheapness of materials a problem, but the complete lack of architectural integrity as well. I walk around some places and they are a total mishmash. Guess what - there are no architects for most of these things, just CAD guys grabbing stuff from here and there without thinking, mishmashing it together. Our homes are like poorly cropped photoshop mishmashes of random photos from the internet. I was once visiting Tunisia, a local man was showing me around, he pointed out the fountain that his brother designed. He said he didn't like it, I didn't see why. He point out that the perimeter was Arabic, and the main fountain was colonial i.e. Italian renaissance. As soon as he pointed that out, even my untrained eye could see the issue immediately, I was like 'oh yeah' obviously. This guy was not educated, I'm not sure how literate he was, and yet even he could point out basic architectural issues. The world is such a mix we forget what the components are, and are unfortunately not able to forge our own. I feel it's not quite a 'nice mix' but 'lowest / cheapest common denominator' in most things.
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  I'm so glad somebody understands and discusses these problems.
  • qwertay 8y ago
    I have read a bunch of things from this website and they have some really great ideas. They aren't even that radical, just really well thought out.
• crwalker 8y ago
  Current US zoning creates vast swathes of single-family-housing-only areas. This segregation prevents a lifestyle of walking. In order to preserve the value of single-family houses, we've chosen to destroy the livability of the city.
• Findeton 8y ago
  We regulate everything.
• someguydave 8y ago
  Central planning is awesome! Everyone should be regulated to build things which are good in my opinion!
  • closeparen 8y ago
    Better than the status quo of regulating everyone to build strip malls.
  • kerbalspacepro 8y ago
    I feel like your sarcasm is missing the point. Nobody really believes that regulations are all good or all bad. There are, however, more or less effective regulations. Trying to find effective regulations like what Strong Towns are doing, is a good thing!
    • someguydave 8y ago
      The point of my sarcasm is different: the word "effective" implies that some goal is being achieved. Who sets the goal? Why do they have the authority to tell people what to do on their property?