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NYC has serious and complicated problems and it's perhaps not the best idea to hold it up as the pinnacle of a "walkable town". There are better choices to use
by crispyambulance 4y ago
NYC has serious and complicated problems and it's perhaps not the best idea to hold it up as the pinnacle of a "walkable town". There are better choices to use for that example.
As you sort-of implicitly suggest, it doesn't have to be a choice between a soulless suburb with no sidewalks and a piss-soaked urban hellscape-- with NOTHING in-between.
What we do need, however, is more urban centers with walkable, complete streets, human amenities and a broad mix of different housing types for a wide spectrum income levels and NOT separate isolated enclaves for the wealthy and the poor. Especially important are appropriate and truly useable "third-places" rather just bauble shops for the wealthy, dollar stores for the poor, and distant megamalls for the middle-class surrounded an ocean of asphalt.
- m_ke 4y agoNYC is not midtown manhattan. Please go check out Queens or Brooklyn next time you visit, I promise you it's safe and full of walkable and bikeable streets.
- ahoy 4y agoThis is the kind of comment you write when your only experience with NYC is as a tourist in the densest parts of Manhattan.
- ch4s3 4y agoWhere are you going in NYC? I live in a tree lined neighborhood with pleasant little cafes and restaurants. I bike a lot of places and I'm equally close to two large parks. There's some mix of incomes as the adjacent neighborhoods blend together. I hear the schools are pretty good, and there's good train access.
- m_ke 4y agoSome people think New Yorkers live in Times Square or the Empire State Building.
- crispyambulance 4y agowoah... I am not "against" NYC. I think it's awesome as a whole and I go there frequently. But yeah, it does have deep problems, the cost-of-living is borderline insane and it REALLY DOES smell like pee in far too many places. I am just saying that NYC is not the best example of where we want urban centers to aspire to. For one thing, nothing in the USA is as big and or has the financial resources of NYC. Towns in the US that want to improve their housing situation need to look towards what OTHER SIMILAR towns are doing and are successful at. NYC is such a weird case on the basis of scale and density.
- ch4s3 4y agoYeah, cost of living is a serious issue. We've been under-building housing for nearly 30 years. I think that's all basically fair. I'm interested in how some places in Utah are trying to tackle housing, but haven't spent much time reading about it yet.