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As someone who lives in a single-family home, I'm totally for public transit, having fewer cars on the streets, more walkability, etc. But until cities solve t
by yep_thats_right 7y ago
As someone who lives in a single-family home, I'm totally for public transit, having fewer cars on the streets, more walkability, etc.
But until cities solve the issues of smell and noise, I'm not interested in living in a dense area. Keep it clean and quiet. Invest in urban forestry. Then it starts to look appealing.
- jefftk 7y agoI live in Somerville MA, which is has about 18k people per square mile, compared to the ~2-6k I see in the South Bay. It gets that density through many two and three family houses placed closely together, and it's not smelly or noisy. Here's a representative street view example: https://goo.gl/maps/ggwHETDomuRUQAB89 https://goo.gl/maps/ggwHETDomuRUQAB89 You can be much denser than the Bay Area while still having trees and feeling "residential".
- shados 7y ago> and it's not smelly or noisy Yes, yes it is. Somerville mades me go to NYC when I want a quiet vacation. The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, but the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it. When houses are built in cardboard with no space between the walls and the sidewalk, and someone walks home drunk, you'll get woken up something quick.
- jefftk 7y ago> The absolute noise and other issue is much lower, the city is designed and built so poorly it can't handle it My experience of Somerville has been very different from yours: I've never been woken up by noise coming in from the street, and I've lived in two very typical wood-frame houses (first a triple-decker in East Somerville, now a two-family near Davis). But it's also worth separating "what should you build a house out of to avoid noise infiltration" and "what sort of neighborhood densities can you have with low levels of ambient outdoor noise".
- shados 7y agoI mean, just the noise from the events in Davis Square can be heard from half a mile away, so most decibel meters would flag that as "pretty loud".
- jefftk 7y agoI'm within a half mile of Davis and don't remember ever hearing an event there from my house? Maybe Honk?
- shados 7y agoJust the typical music events (not the small solo musicians but when there is an actual show) they hold every now and then, or when the flea market gets pretty crazy can definitely make it hard to watch TV even with windows closed in my experience.
- yep_thats_right 7y agoYeah, that sounds like a good path for cities to take toward compromise and growth. To give a counterpoint to my own initial post, suburbs have their own noxious smells and noise: leafblowers, lawnmowers, cars galore.
- smileysteve 7y agoWelcome to Atlanta! If you walk about 5 blocks from Peachtree in Midtown, you're in single family home territory; It turns from a bustling city to hearing mostly birds; from traffic to few cars (because there are no through streets from Piedmont to Monroe x 10th to Ponce, or Monroe to Highland x MorningSide to Ponce.
- WalterSear 7y agoYou get one or the other: low density housing, or effective public transit. https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html
- yep_thats_right 7y agoYeah, I know. But I'm saying there are other factors at play in how people make decisions about where to live.