4 ms·

I think the house and the yard aren't the nightmare, but the miles of cookie cutter housing developments attached to arterials studded with strip malls are. An

by abeppu 3y ago

I think the house and the yard aren't the nightmare, but the miles of cookie cutter housing developments attached to arterials studded with strip malls are. And those are the communities which were invented and built by central planning, by people saying: "these businesses all need to meet a large parking minimum, and these areas are _only_ allowed to be single family homes, and this other area can _only_ be commercial, and these arterials will then need to have 45 mph speed limits so drivers can get from their homes to the store in a reasonable period, and since they're going fast the lanes should be wide so I guess we won't have room for a bike lane, and only one side of the street can have a sidewalk, and hey what do you know, that really fits with our intention to not put crosswalks except at those intersections every 1/2 mile ...". Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like. The design of the suburb _coerces_ people to drive by threatening the lives of cyclists and pedestrians, and invariably having poor or slow public transit.

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tivert 3y ago
> I think the house and the yard aren't the nightmare, but the miles of cookie cutter housing developments attached to arterials studded with strip malls is. Those aren't nightmares either. Or rather, they're only nightmares if your idea of a nightmare is "alternatives to urban living exist." Also the selective use of "cookie cutter" as a pejorative is interesting. Everything is cookie cutter, especially dense urban development (e.g. all the rail-adjacent apartment complexes I've seen built in the last decade or two). But of course it's only a problem when we're talking about the trendy-to-hate suburbs. Almost all those other requirements you complain about follow directly from a desire to live in a quiet neighborhood, and the rest are almost certainly a function of traditional American excessive cost-cutting (e.g. the sidewalks on one side, which are not universal). If people didn't actually want to live in quiet neighborhoods, they'd have stayed in the cities. > Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like. You missed my point: suburbs are desirable, but your urban advocate central planners lie and claim they aren't (e.g. they're "nightmares," people only moved there because of "marketing", etc. that have been repeated in this thread).
- abeppu 3y ago
  This whole conversation stems from an article about the excessive cost of putting parking _everywhere_, and acknowledging that while the desire to have a car and to want a place to park it is reasonable, that policy decisions fixating on that create costs for _everyone_. The article specifically mentions how in LA after the 1960s it was infeasible to develop medium-sized housing projects because of the parking minimum requirements. And planning specifically means that a lot of property owners were blocked from building higher density on their property. I.e. the car-centric and suburbanite central planners won, have been in control for decades, and their policies actively exacerbate the housing shortage even in urban markets. In that context, it's absurd for you to act like suburbanites are the brow-beaten victims of city-dwellers telling you how to live. People living in the city who don't own cars are paying higher housing costs because of planing policies that demand that developers build more parking, or disallow multi-unit projects. It's the car-folk who are telling everyone else how to live, and have been for decades. The city-residents are also subsidizing the road construction and maintenance and the less efficient emergency services for suburbs in our counties, and the whole planet has to deal with the higher carbon footprint. For you to frame this as all about individuals just happening to prefer driving and living in suburbs is disingenuous when the policy problems are _all about_ car-centric policies _forcing_ unnecessary constraints onto people. The LA guy in the article that wanted to open a deli but spent 6 figures and multiple years blocked over showing that he was meeting the parking requirements, and then giving up -- why is his desire to open a business less important than your desire to drive and have ample parking wherever you go? Suburban drivers are not the victims here; they are the problem.
  - orwin 3y ago
    The reason why suburbia historically dictate how the city center is built in the US is pretty clear too. I hate this, but this was a race issue. Now that rich (white guys) reinvested the city center, i guess we'll see policy changes and less parking.

by abeppu 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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tivert 3y ago

> I think the house and the yard aren't the nightmare, but the miles of cookie cutter housing developments attached to arterials studded with strip malls is. Those aren't nightmares either. Or rather, they're only nightmares if your idea of a nightmare is "alternatives to urban living exist." Also the selective use of "cookie cutter" as a pejorative is interesting. Everything is cookie cutter, especially dense urban development (e.g. all the rail-adjacent apartment complexes I've seen built in the last decade or two). But of course it's only a problem when we're talking about the trendy-to-hate suburbs. Almost all those other requirements you complain about follow directly from a desire to live in a quiet neighborhood, and the rest are almost certainly a function of traditional American excessive cost-cutting (e.g. the sidewalks on one side, which are not universal). If people didn't actually want to live in quiet neighborhoods, they'd have stayed in the cities. > Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like. You missed my point: suburbs are desirable, but your urban advocate central planners lie and claim they aren't (e.g. they're "nightmares," people only moved there because of "marketing", etc. that have been repeated in this thread).

abeppu 3y ago
This whole conversation stems from an article about the excessive cost of putting parking _everywhere_, and acknowledging that while the desire to have a car and to want a place to park it is reasonable, that policy decisions fixating on that create costs for _everyone_. The article specifically mentions how in LA after the 1960s it was infeasible to develop medium-sized housing projects because of the parking minimum requirements. And planning specifically means that a lot of property owners were blocked from building higher density on their property. I.e. the car-centric and suburbanite central planners won, have been in control for decades, and their policies actively exacerbate the housing shortage even in urban markets. In that context, it's absurd for you to act like suburbanites are the brow-beaten victims of city-dwellers telling you how to live. People living in the city who don't own cars are paying higher housing costs because of planing policies that demand that developers build more parking, or disallow multi-unit projects. It's the car-folk who are telling everyone else how to live, and have been for decades. The city-residents are also subsidizing the road construction and maintenance and the less efficient emergency services for suburbs in our counties, and the whole planet has to deal with the higher carbon footprint. For you to frame this as all about individuals just happening to prefer driving and living in suburbs is disingenuous when the policy problems are _all about_ car-centric policies _forcing_ unnecessary constraints onto people. The LA guy in the article that wanted to open a deli but spent 6 figures and multiple years blocked over showing that he was meeting the parking requirements, and then giving up -- why is his desire to open a business less important than your desire to drive and have ample parking wherever you go? Suburban drivers are not the victims here; they are the problem.
- orwin 3y ago
  The reason why suburbia historically dictate how the city center is built in the US is pretty clear too. I hate this, but this was a race issue. Now that rich (white guys) reinvested the city center, i guess we'll see policy changes and less parking.