7 ms·

> car-free neighborhood built from scratch I am not sure the "building from scratch" approach can really move the needle in terms of livable and sustainable ur

> car-free neighborhood built from scratch I am not sure the "building from scratch" approach can really move the needle in terms of livable and sustainable urban environments. Like, how many centuries before natural replacement rates would achieve a transition? The key challenge much of the world is facing (certainly the most polluting part of the world) is to rehabilitate the vast numbers of existing housing stock, and reinvent better uses of the existing urban layouts as people are stuck with them. An exception where such green-field ideas could have impact would be in the context of developing world urbanization (i.e., how not to do the same mistakes others did) but there other considerations (cost) enter the discussion.

crabmusket 3y ago
I'm reading Jane Jacobs right now- she's excellent broadly, but one specific thing she argues for that I found really surprising is a diversity in the age of buildings. It's one way to make possible the diversity of uses and financial needs that are an aspect of vibrant neighbourhoods. In her analysis, older buildings tend to have paid off their capital costs.
- bombcar 3y ago
  This is across-the-board important - because you can rarely "build new" what poorer people need. For example, nobody can "build used cars" - you need a vibrant car market that has used cars available at price points that others can afford. Same thing applies to houses; you can't "build cheap housing" directly - you build new housing and the older housing decreases in price. Which is why I have no problem with a brand new apartment building being built and having a luxury bent, even though it might be built on top of a walmart or something; the people living there free up space elsewhere.
  - xnx 3y ago
    Seconding this. Affordable housing mandates are counterproductive. Let developers put property to "the highest and best use". Those who are rich/gullible enough to buy new "luxury" units will benefit by getting the luxury properties from 20 years ago.
    - dtech 3y ago
      If the mandate is to built 5 moderately sized appartements instead of 3 large units they increase supply.
      - xnx 3y ago
        That seems mathematically true, but doesn't tell the whole story. Imagine a common scenario in my city where the prospective buyer/renter of one of those new apartments is considering tearing down and older multi-unit structure to build a single-family home. In that situation, the availability of an larger unit could result in more total housing units. Because they have financial incentive, developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants.
        sandworm101 3y ago
        >> developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants. Correct. Developers build to what the market wants. But that doesn't mean they build to what people want. If given total freedom, developers often chase the upscale market, rich people wanting high-priced units. That is where profit is to be made. That is what the market wants. But that is not necessarily what a city actually needs.
        hedora 3y ago
        Ignoring what the market wants doesn't work. If you maximize the return on investment of building more housing, then more people will build houses. If you make housing construction unprofitable, then fewer people will build houses. Also, people act like a glut of luxury housing would be a problem. It absolutely wouldn't. It would displace and therefore depress prices for midrange units. If the developers end up losing money selling their new luxury housing at a loss, then they've effectively just subsidized the US housing supply. That's much less expensive for taxpayers than having the government subsidize + force people to build housing that sells for less than construction costs.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    I see this comment all around me. The cheap apartments around me are the fancy apartments from the 80s. The midrange apartments are the fancy apartments from the 90s and 00s.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Ah, you live in an area there they were still building in the past thirty years, I see. In no-growth parts of California, the cheap apartments from the 80s are sky high in prices, while the decrepit apartments from the 60s and 70s are merely very expensive.
      - vel0city 3y ago
        > In no-growth parts of California The answer is obvious. Don't live in those no-growth places.
        epistasis 3y ago
        When the economic opportunity is so high, that is in no way an obvious answer. The obvious answer is to change the environmentally and humanitarian disaster of no-growth politics of low-slung suburbs.
    - ido 3y ago
      And yet the fanciest apartments are the fancy apartments of the 1920s and earlier
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    This is exactly right. Like most things, looking at topics as "supply and demand" enables the right understanding. New luxury construction takes demand (and thus dollars) from the next-best-thing so it becomes less expensive. That enables the people who previously could not afford it to seek it, which makes the next-next-best thing less expensive in turn. The flip side of this is when demand outstrips supply, so you have people paying several thousands per month for a studio in a walkup in Hell's Kitchen. But to be very clear, it would cost even more if not for the new high-rises within that square mile.
    - rickydroll 3y ago
      that's true you don't think that housing is subject to induced demand. I think more housing built in an area will increase the demand for housing in that area. It'll never stop. another way to look at is why should someone drop the price on the property if adding new housing doesn't decrease demand. one could make the case that building new luxury housing will free up the expensive housing for people that still can't afford it.
      - xyzelement 3y ago
        If demand is really infinite then your logic applies but I see no reason to think that it's the case. How does building new buildings increase demand? Only by making housing move available and thus dropping the price. In other words, I am either in the market for a $5M apartment on Park Ave or I am not. If a new building gets built, it doesn't make me go "well hmm, I never thought about living in NYC, but now that there are 50 more apartments available, I think I will". What DOES happen is that ~50 people who were previously competing for the same handful of pre-war buildings now just bought into this new place because it's nicer. All of a sudden there's less buying pressure on the existing inventory so the seller has to drop the price (ie, if ppl aren't buying my apartment because the same $5M can get them new construction, maybe I gotta drop it to 4.7M)
  - pchristensen 3y ago
    One difference between now and Jane Jacobs' time is that you can build housing that poor people need, by allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing. While you can't build affordable 4 bedroom single family houses at 5 per acre, you can build affordable 700-1000sf 3-4 bedroom apartments at 40-60 per acre. In the case of Culdesac, they removed roads, parking, garages, and lawns. For people that want and can afford those things, there are plenty of options already.
    - adolph 3y ago
      > allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing Never heard of restrictions on minimum house size and amenities. Is this a widespread thing? Would an expression of “smaller, lower amenity housing” be the standard mobile home neighborhood?
      - pchristensen 3y ago
        Basically everywhere in the USA (and I believe most of the world) has restrictions on minimum house size, maximum building coverage on the lot, height limits, setbacks from property lines, room sizes, etc, etc, etc. Mobile home parks are one way to have lower cost housing, but far from the only one. They are much less common than in the past, as they are being regulated and bought out of existence.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        The restrictions are ones of practicality. There's a "minimum code" house you can build (that has the minimums required wherever possible) and it will be a certain price. But things like utilities, etc will be a "per unit" cost not a "per square foot" cost, but selling the unit is pretty close to "per square foot" so the temptation is to inflate that as best you can to make the per unit costs as minimal as possible. Mobile homes parks are a way to bypass certain slumlord laws; because the slumlord only rents the "land" and the mobile home is owned by the tenant, and lots of slumlord laws don't apply to your own home.
        adolph 3y ago
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Just ran across an expert looking at recent data and being shocked at how fast this is happening right now, today: https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46 https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46 Short summary, mid-range apartments (grade B, not new but not decrepit), are seeing the biggest decrease in rents when there's a ton of building going on.
- epistasis 3y ago
  If you try to make this argument today as a reason we should build more housing now, it will be dismissed as "trickle down housing" ala Reagonomics. This has been one of my great frustrations when trying to get more affordable housing built.
AwaAwa 3y ago
Building from scratch, requires scratching out many 'unhappy' people. But that point is always glossed over, until it is just a statistic.
xnx 3y ago
Agree. Dreams of "starting from scratch" are directly analogous to programmers who don't care to learn the existing business situation or read someone else's code.
akamaka 3y ago
The transition to suburban living happened within only a few decades, so it’s not unreasonable to think we could undo a lot of the mistakes within our own lifetimes.
- Night_Thastus 3y ago
  That happened when there was plenty of available space to build such suburban housing. They did not bulldoze vast swaths of urban to make room. If you wanted to do the reverse, that's what you'd need to do - unless you're making a new city from scratch.
  - Kerrick 3y ago
    > They did not bulldoze vast swaths of urban to make room They certainly did, depending on your definition of vast. "According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide because of the federal roadway construction." https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...
  - epistasis 3y ago
    The difference is that it won't take much space to replace the suburbs with low-car or no-car living. Doing infill housing in metropolises is many many times more efficient in terms of land use, infrastructure demands, etc. We don't need to make new cities from scratch at all, we simply need to allow gradual redevelopment of the urban cores.
    - Muromec 3y ago
      Why replace suburbs if you can put a tram line or urban train and upzone parts of it close to the stations.
      - epistasis 3y ago
        Exactly! Merely allowing a tiny fraction of already developed land to be redeveloped at what were natural rates 120 years ago would mean that the suburbs would be almost completely untouched while those who want something different can also get what they want out of life.
davidw 3y ago
One idea that I love is the "Accessory Commercial Unit" or ACU, taking a page from the "granny flat" or ADU: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/15/accessory-commercial-units https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/15/accessory-comm... In most places in most American cities and towns, you can't just go build a commercial extension to your house like that, you have to jump through a lot of hoops, and for a low margin business, it's probably not worth it. Making that kind of thing legal again (it used to be pretty much everywhere) will help transform more areas of more cities into something a bit more walkable.
- Veliladon 3y ago
  Yes. This. Not being able to build an ADU by right is so weird to me. If I could build an ADU I could help with the housing crisis.
  - dickersnoodle 3y ago
    You'd have to get past the lobbyists for the residential REITs and private equity lenders who don't want anyone to help with the housing crises because it'll cut into their profits.
    - davidw 3y ago
      In my experience doing work with a local YIMBY organization: it's mostly local NIMBYs. When there's a city council meeting about some housing policy, it's not some guy from New York in a suit who shows up, it's local NIMBYs. When there are proposed duplexes in a "nice" area of town, it's the neighbors who organize to stop them, not some far off corporation. The positive aspect to this, though, is that a group of pro-housing locals can make a huge difference in the conversation and see real progress. It is really meaningful and fulfilling to see housing built that you helped advocate for.
      - rickydroll 3y ago
        take a look at the NIMBYs perspective. They have a house, neighborhood that they like. It has certain characteristics that makes it worth living in for them.from the few I've spoken with, the feeling seems to be that city centers are unpleasant and expensive and most importantly, if they wanted to live in a city, they would've moved into a city. as long as you ignore their perspective, you will get pushback. My objections are different from most. We need to re-wild as much as we can of lawns. We need to construct more wildlife corridors so carnivores like coyotes and foxes can come into suburban and urban spaces to feast on the mice and rats. we need to drop nighttime lighting down to much lower levels so that nocturnal creatures have a play second live and reproduce.
angarg12 3y ago
My hometown was founded by romans, and during the last 10 years the local government has made big efforts to make the city more walkable and pedestrian friendly. If a 2000+ years old city can do it, surely American towns can.
- pyuser583 3y ago
  Didn’t the Romans build walkable cities? What happened to make them less walkable?
  - mitthrowaway2 3y ago
    I'm not sure what the GP's city is, but many old cities in Europe were torn up in the 1960s-70s for freeways and parking lots, because the future would be the age of the automobile. People look to Amsterdam now as a pedestrian and bicycle paradise, but that's a recent development; until a couple decades ago it was as car dependent as anywhere.
- chongli 3y ago
  A 2000 year old city has a much better chance of being walkable than an American city. Take a look at something like the Dallas/Fort Worth area. It’s an enormous sprawling web of low density suburbs. To make it walkable would require a very large amount of effort and that effort would likely be wasted due to the climate. Even a five minute walk down the street is going to leave you exhausted and dripping with sweat on most summer days there.
  - JWLong 3y ago
    It’s possible that some trees might help that.
    - positr0n 3y ago
      There's plenty of trees most places. Dallas has the largest urban forest in the US.
derefr 3y ago
> reinvent better uses of the existing urban layouts as people are stuck with them. They are most certainly not. Many car-dependent cities, large and small, are depopulating, quite rapidly. (Some at over 10% population loss per year!) This depopulation doesn't come from a city's urban core(s), usually; but rather specifically from the areas of these cities worst affected by car dependence — the sparse fringes of suburbia, and the exurban developments. (The people living in these places have the most car-centric, non-urban-infrastructure-reliant lifestyles to begin with; so when they get a better job offer somewhere else, they are unfettered from simply packing their things in their car and moving. This makes these suburban fringes and exurbs much more vulnerable to depopulation during low-employment periods, housing-affordability crises, etc.) For many cities, these depopulated fringes and exurbs have nobody left in them at this point to care what happens to the area; and so, in response, these cities have often been literally shrinking, de-incorporating these exurbs from themselves, in order to avoid paying infrastructure costs indefinitely for roads and pipes and wires that nobody is using. And after 10-or-so years of this state of de-incorporation and abandonment, there is nothing of value left in these places to directly move into and reuse. A perhaps-surprisingly constant amount of maintenance is required, both of buildings and of infrastructure, to keep both from falling apart. • Suburban SFH homes in North America — usually stick-built, and usually in boreal-forest conditions — that have gone un-lived-in for more than five years or so (and not left in the hands of any bank’s or property developer’s maintenance company), are almost always a total write-off, not worth attempting to repair: they're inevitably mostly rotted, the rain having gotten in at one point and made a home for humidity and mold/fungus, destroying the structural integrity of the framing. (You might be able to save homes that have sat in desert climates like Arizona, but these have their own problems related to fast oxidation of metals, incl. electrical and plumbing. Maybe concrete+plaster Mission-style architecture can be saved; but after 10 years of disuse, you'd still need to gut the building to get it livable again.) • An exurban "low-CapEx high-OpEx" asphalt road grid, that hasn't been driven on in 10 years, is no longer drivable: asphalt does not survive 10 years without maintenance, even if nobody is driving on it. It's likely been undermined over time with huge numbers of small sinkholes — sinkholes that will become innumerable potholes when the first person brave enough to drive down the weathered road runs over them. The roads would need, at least, to be mulched up and spat back out by a road re-paving machine (with a refill and resurface of the undermined subbase + subgrade layers in between) to make them safe. If you're going to have to do both of those things to make conditions livable again in that area — raze all the buildings, and recycle all the asphalt — then you may as well do all the razing and asphalt-mulching all at once, first — and so end up with a fresh and empty terrain and a pile of materials, ready to be re-laid out in whatever (hopefully more compact!) fashion you choose.
pchristensen 3y ago
This was on a 16 acre site in the middle of Tempe (a city with over 25,000 acres, for reference). That is any given cluster of 10-50 houses in suburban areas. The USA has ~30 million acres of suburbs. While the design and execution of the project look great, the key is that it's legal. If building like this was legal, by right, in more places, then the market would naturally transition to something like this if people desire it. Right now, any deviation from zoning has to be fought for with time and money, and as a rule of thumb, everything that gets built will stay that way forever. If successful, desirable, small scale projects like this lead to zoning being loosened, then hopefully the existing urban layouts will no longer be stuck.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
You need to do both by changing the building codes/zoning laws/public infrastructure best practice documents (think the things used to guide road design, etc). Then all greenfield construction ends up looking much more like the awesome Netherlands and every time anything is built, or public infrastructure is renewed in a brownfield area it is brought up to the standard. It didn't take that many decades for the Netherlands to go from terrible to awesome using this method.

crabmusket 3y ago

I'm reading Jane Jacobs right now- she's excellent broadly, but one specific thing she argues for that I found really surprising is a diversity in the age of buildings. It's one way to make possible the diversity of uses and financial needs that are an aspect of vibrant neighbourhoods. In her analysis, older buildings tend to have paid off their capital costs.

bombcar 3y ago
This is across-the-board important - because you can rarely "build new" what poorer people need. For example, nobody can "build used cars" - you need a vibrant car market that has used cars available at price points that others can afford. Same thing applies to houses; you can't "build cheap housing" directly - you build new housing and the older housing decreases in price. Which is why I have no problem with a brand new apartment building being built and having a luxury bent, even though it might be built on top of a walmart or something; the people living there free up space elsewhere.
- xnx 3y ago
  Seconding this. Affordable housing mandates are counterproductive. Let developers put property to "the highest and best use". Those who are rich/gullible enough to buy new "luxury" units will benefit by getting the luxury properties from 20 years ago.
  - dtech 3y ago
    If the mandate is to built 5 moderately sized appartements instead of 3 large units they increase supply.
    - xnx 3y ago
      That seems mathematically true, but doesn't tell the whole story. Imagine a common scenario in my city where the prospective buyer/renter of one of those new apartments is considering tearing down and older multi-unit structure to build a single-family home. In that situation, the availability of an larger unit could result in more total housing units. Because they have financial incentive, developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants.
      - sandworm101 3y ago
        >> developers are often the ones in the position to best understand what the market wants. Correct. Developers build to what the market wants. But that doesn't mean they build to what people want. If given total freedom, developers often chase the upscale market, rich people wanting high-priced units. That is where profit is to be made. That is what the market wants. But that is not necessarily what a city actually needs.
        hedora 3y ago
        Ignoring what the market wants doesn't work. If you maximize the return on investment of building more housing, then more people will build houses. If you make housing construction unprofitable, then fewer people will build houses. Also, people act like a glut of luxury housing would be a problem. It absolutely wouldn't. It would displace and therefore depress prices for midrange units. If the developers end up losing money selling their new luxury housing at a loss, then they've effectively just subsidized the US housing supply. That's much less expensive for taxpayers than having the government subsidize + force people to build housing that sells for less than construction costs.
- vel0city 3y ago
  I see this comment all around me. The cheap apartments around me are the fancy apartments from the 80s. The midrange apartments are the fancy apartments from the 90s and 00s.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Ah, you live in an area there they were still building in the past thirty years, I see. In no-growth parts of California, the cheap apartments from the 80s are sky high in prices, while the decrepit apartments from the 60s and 70s are merely very expensive.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      > In no-growth parts of California The answer is obvious. Don't live in those no-growth places.
      - epistasis 3y ago
        When the economic opportunity is so high, that is in no way an obvious answer. The obvious answer is to change the environmentally and humanitarian disaster of no-growth politics of low-slung suburbs.
  - ido 3y ago
    And yet the fanciest apartments are the fancy apartments of the 1920s and earlier
- xyzelement 3y ago
  This is exactly right. Like most things, looking at topics as "supply and demand" enables the right understanding. New luxury construction takes demand (and thus dollars) from the next-best-thing so it becomes less expensive. That enables the people who previously could not afford it to seek it, which makes the next-next-best thing less expensive in turn. The flip side of this is when demand outstrips supply, so you have people paying several thousands per month for a studio in a walkup in Hell's Kitchen. But to be very clear, it would cost even more if not for the new high-rises within that square mile.
  - rickydroll 3y ago
    that's true you don't think that housing is subject to induced demand. I think more housing built in an area will increase the demand for housing in that area. It'll never stop. another way to look at is why should someone drop the price on the property if adding new housing doesn't decrease demand. one could make the case that building new luxury housing will free up the expensive housing for people that still can't afford it.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      If demand is really infinite then your logic applies but I see no reason to think that it's the case. How does building new buildings increase demand? Only by making housing move available and thus dropping the price. In other words, I am either in the market for a $5M apartment on Park Ave or I am not. If a new building gets built, it doesn't make me go "well hmm, I never thought about living in NYC, but now that there are 50 more apartments available, I think I will". What DOES happen is that ~50 people who were previously competing for the same handful of pre-war buildings now just bought into this new place because it's nicer. All of a sudden there's less buying pressure on the existing inventory so the seller has to drop the price (ie, if ppl aren't buying my apartment because the same $5M can get them new construction, maybe I gotta drop it to 4.7M)
- pchristensen 3y ago
  One difference between now and Jane Jacobs' time is that you can build housing that poor people need, by allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing. While you can't build affordable 4 bedroom single family houses at 5 per acre, you can build affordable 700-1000sf 3-4 bedroom apartments at 40-60 per acre. In the case of Culdesac, they removed roads, parking, garages, and lawns. For people that want and can afford those things, there are plenty of options already.
  - adolph 3y ago
    > allowing the construction of smaller, lower amenity housing Never heard of restrictions on minimum house size and amenities. Is this a widespread thing? Would an expression of “smaller, lower amenity housing” be the standard mobile home neighborhood?
    - pchristensen 3y ago
      Basically everywhere in the USA (and I believe most of the world) has restrictions on minimum house size, maximum building coverage on the lot, height limits, setbacks from property lines, room sizes, etc, etc, etc. Mobile home parks are one way to have lower cost housing, but far from the only one. They are much less common than in the past, as they are being regulated and bought out of existence.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      The restrictions are ones of practicality. There's a "minimum code" house you can build (that has the minimums required wherever possible) and it will be a certain price. But things like utilities, etc will be a "per unit" cost not a "per square foot" cost, but selling the unit is pretty close to "per square foot" so the temptation is to inflate that as best you can to make the per unit costs as minimal as possible. Mobile homes parks are a way to bypass certain slumlord laws; because the slumlord only rents the "land" and the mobile home is owned by the tenant, and lots of slumlord laws don't apply to your own home.
      - adolph 3y ago
- epistasis 3y ago
  Just ran across an expert looking at recent data and being shocked at how fast this is happening right now, today: https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46 https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46 Short summary, mid-range apartments (grade B, not new but not decrepit), are seeing the biggest decrease in rents when there's a ton of building going on.
epistasis 3y ago
If you try to make this argument today as a reason we should build more housing now, it will be dismissed as "trickle down housing" ala Reagonomics. This has been one of my great frustrations when trying to get more affordable housing built.

AwaAwa 3y ago

Building from scratch, requires scratching out many 'unhappy' people. But that point is always glossed over, until it is just a statistic.

xnx 3y ago

Agree. Dreams of "starting from scratch" are directly analogous to programmers who don't care to learn the existing business situation or read someone else's code.

akamaka 3y ago

The transition to suburban living happened within only a few decades, so it’s not unreasonable to think we could undo a lot of the mistakes within our own lifetimes.

Night_Thastus 3y ago
That happened when there was plenty of available space to build such suburban housing. They did not bulldoze vast swaths of urban to make room. If you wanted to do the reverse, that's what you'd need to do - unless you're making a new city from scratch.
- Kerrick 3y ago
  > They did not bulldoze vast swaths of urban to make room They certainly did, depending on your definition of vast. "According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide because of the federal roadway construction." https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infrastructure-construction-segregation https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...
- epistasis 3y ago
  The difference is that it won't take much space to replace the suburbs with low-car or no-car living. Doing infill housing in metropolises is many many times more efficient in terms of land use, infrastructure demands, etc. We don't need to make new cities from scratch at all, we simply need to allow gradual redevelopment of the urban cores.
  - Muromec 3y ago
    Why replace suburbs if you can put a tram line or urban train and upzone parts of it close to the stations.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Exactly! Merely allowing a tiny fraction of already developed land to be redeveloped at what were natural rates 120 years ago would mean that the suburbs would be almost completely untouched while those who want something different can also get what they want out of life.

davidw 3y ago

One idea that I love is the "Accessory Commercial Unit" or ACU, taking a page from the "granny flat" or ADU: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/15/accessory-commercial-units https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/15/accessory-comm... In most places in most American cities and towns, you can't just go build a commercial extension to your house like that, you have to jump through a lot of hoops, and for a low margin business, it's probably not worth it. Making that kind of thing legal again (it used to be pretty much everywhere) will help transform more areas of more cities into something a bit more walkable.

Veliladon 3y ago
Yes. This. Not being able to build an ADU by right is so weird to me. If I could build an ADU I could help with the housing crisis.
- dickersnoodle 3y ago
  You'd have to get past the lobbyists for the residential REITs and private equity lenders who don't want anyone to help with the housing crises because it'll cut into their profits.
  - davidw 3y ago
    In my experience doing work with a local YIMBY organization: it's mostly local NIMBYs. When there's a city council meeting about some housing policy, it's not some guy from New York in a suit who shows up, it's local NIMBYs. When there are proposed duplexes in a "nice" area of town, it's the neighbors who organize to stop them, not some far off corporation. The positive aspect to this, though, is that a group of pro-housing locals can make a huge difference in the conversation and see real progress. It is really meaningful and fulfilling to see housing built that you helped advocate for.
    - rickydroll 3y ago
      take a look at the NIMBYs perspective. They have a house, neighborhood that they like. It has certain characteristics that makes it worth living in for them.from the few I've spoken with, the feeling seems to be that city centers are unpleasant and expensive and most importantly, if they wanted to live in a city, they would've moved into a city. as long as you ignore their perspective, you will get pushback. My objections are different from most. We need to re-wild as much as we can of lawns. We need to construct more wildlife corridors so carnivores like coyotes and foxes can come into suburban and urban spaces to feast on the mice and rats. we need to drop nighttime lighting down to much lower levels so that nocturnal creatures have a play second live and reproduce.

angarg12 3y ago

My hometown was founded by romans, and during the last 10 years the local government has made big efforts to make the city more walkable and pedestrian friendly. If a 2000+ years old city can do it, surely American towns can.

pyuser583 3y ago
Didn’t the Romans build walkable cities? What happened to make them less walkable?
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  I'm not sure what the GP's city is, but many old cities in Europe were torn up in the 1960s-70s for freeways and parking lots, because the future would be the age of the automobile. People look to Amsterdam now as a pedestrian and bicycle paradise, but that's a recent development; until a couple decades ago it was as car dependent as anywhere.
chongli 3y ago
A 2000 year old city has a much better chance of being walkable than an American city. Take a look at something like the Dallas/Fort Worth area. It’s an enormous sprawling web of low density suburbs. To make it walkable would require a very large amount of effort and that effort would likely be wasted due to the climate. Even a five minute walk down the street is going to leave you exhausted and dripping with sweat on most summer days there.
- JWLong 3y ago
  It’s possible that some trees might help that.
  - positr0n 3y ago
    There's plenty of trees most places. Dallas has the largest urban forest in the US.

derefr 3y ago

> reinvent better uses of the existing urban layouts as people are stuck with them. They are most certainly not. Many car-dependent cities, large and small, are depopulating, quite rapidly. (Some at over 10% population loss per year!) This depopulation doesn't come from a city's urban core(s), usually; but rather specifically from the areas of these cities worst affected by car dependence — the sparse fringes of suburbia, and the exurban developments. (The people living in these places have the most car-centric, non-urban-infrastructure-reliant lifestyles to begin with; so when they get a better job offer somewhere else, they are unfettered from simply packing their things in their car and moving. This makes these suburban fringes and exurbs much more vulnerable to depopulation during low-employment periods, housing-affordability crises, etc.) For many cities, these depopulated fringes and exurbs have nobody left in them at this point to care what happens to the area; and so, in response, these cities have often been literally shrinking, de-incorporating these exurbs from themselves, in order to avoid paying infrastructure costs indefinitely for roads and pipes and wires that nobody is using. And after 10-or-so years of this state of de-incorporation and abandonment, there is nothing of value left in these places to directly move into and reuse. A perhaps-surprisingly constant amount of maintenance is required, both of buildings and of infrastructure, to keep both from falling apart. • Suburban SFH homes in North America — usually stick-built, and usually in boreal-forest conditions — that have gone un-lived-in for more than five years or so (and not left in the hands of any bank’s or property developer’s maintenance company), are almost always a total write-off, not worth attempting to repair: they're inevitably mostly rotted, the rain having gotten in at one point and made a home for humidity and mold/fungus, destroying the structural integrity of the framing. (You might be able to save homes that have sat in desert climates like Arizona, but these have their own problems related to fast oxidation of metals, incl. electrical and plumbing. Maybe concrete+plaster Mission-style architecture can be saved; but after 10 years of disuse, you'd still need to gut the building to get it livable again.) • An exurban "low-CapEx high-OpEx" asphalt road grid, that hasn't been driven on in 10 years, is no longer drivable: asphalt does not survive 10 years without maintenance, even if nobody is driving on it. It's likely been undermined over time with huge numbers of small sinkholes — sinkholes that will become innumerable potholes when the first person brave enough to drive down the weathered road runs over them. The roads would need, at least, to be mulched up and spat back out by a road re-paving machine (with a refill and resurface of the undermined subbase + subgrade layers in between) to make them safe. If you're going to have to do both of those things to make conditions livable again in that area — raze all the buildings, and recycle all the asphalt — then you may as well do all the razing and asphalt-mulching all at once, first — and so end up with a fresh and empty terrain and a pile of materials, ready to be re-laid out in whatever (hopefully more compact!) fashion you choose.

pchristensen 3y ago

This was on a 16 acre site in the middle of Tempe (a city with over 25,000 acres, for reference). That is any given cluster of 10-50 houses in suburban areas. The USA has ~30 million acres of suburbs. While the design and execution of the project look great, the key is that it's legal. If building like this was legal, by right, in more places, then the market would naturally transition to something like this if people desire it. Right now, any deviation from zoning has to be fought for with time and money, and as a rule of thumb, everything that gets built will stay that way forever. If successful, desirable, small scale projects like this lead to zoning being loosened, then hopefully the existing urban layouts will no longer be stuck.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

You need to do both by changing the building codes/zoning laws/public infrastructure best practice documents (think the things used to guide road design, etc). Then all greenfield construction ends up looking much more like the awesome Netherlands and every time anything is built, or public infrastructure is renewed in a brownfield area it is brought up to the standard. It didn't take that many decades for the Netherlands to go from terrible to awesome using this method.