3 ms·
Houston is incredibly zoned. They dont call it zoning, but most of the city is designated as mandatory parking lot. This makes some sense, since its too unple
by ouid 4y ago
Houston is incredibly zoned. They dont call it zoning, but most of the city is designated as mandatory parking lot.
This makes some sense, since its too unpleasant outside to walk or bike, for the most part, but it does mean that all commercial is functionally zoned as strip mall. There is a large effort to increase bus transportation in houston, but this is a losing battle because of the aforementioned fundamental restrictions on density.
Those laws are zoning laws.
- masklinn 4y agoIt's really incredible: https://www.munistandards.com/texas/houston/parking-requirements/ https://www.munistandards.com/texas/houston/parking-requirem... Note that the table has a lot of pages, requirements go up to 14 parking spaces per 1000 sqft GFA for "bars, clubs, or lounges"
- voisin 4y agoAbsolutely wild. In my city, 5 per thousand is the maximum and even that creates oceans of under-utilized parking lots. 14 is absurd. In another city I lived in, developers were required to have traffic studies that would show the theoretical parking demand on the 20th busiest day of the year, and that was the parking requirement. You can imagine the garbage-in, garbage-out assumptions that became standard.
- atoav 4y agoWhich hints at a fundamental question: Which one is better: A dense city with lots of interesting stuff in one square mile or a sprawl with just a few interesting things in one square mile? One of those has more parking than it would ever need. And parking lots don't produce tax revenue, they burn it, because these spaces could all have been other things that being money and support the cost of the actual public roads and infrastructure in that square.
- ouid 4y agoTrick question, the answer is don't live in Houston.
- voisin 4y ago> since its too unpleasant outside to walk or bike, for the most part, Why not make mandatory dense tree cover along all sidewalks and walkways?
- WirelessGigabit 4y agoBecause shade does nothing in 90F with 90% humidity. LV/PHX would be better candidates, but trees don’t like to grow there.