4 ms·

Political take: even if many people would like mixed zoning in dense urban centers (with commerce at the street level, and housing above), the familiarity of zo

• aflag 3y ago
  cities: skylines 2 has mixed zones and it's easy to visualise. Just a matter of picking a new colour.
• bobthepanda 3y ago
  That is because American zoning is often use-prescriptive. Japanese zoning is pretty easy to visualize because all zoning types are defined by intensity level, where high intensity zones also allow all lower intensity uses. So rather than a series of venn diagrams, the structure is more like a pyramid.
  • mminer237 3y ago
    American zoning is typically—though not always—cumulative (aka Euclidean) as well. I believe Chicago is an exception to the norm though. The problem is also that people just don't often want to live in a commercial or industrial zone even if they have the right.
    • bobthepanda 3y ago
      Housing in less ideal places makes up the bedrock of affordable housing. The reality is that eventually a city becomes too large to house everyone in a house with a large yard on a cul-de-sac. The entire affordability crisis is driven by bougie tastes pricing people out by eliminating the entire bottom rung of the market. In many places the starter home simply doesn’t exist anymore.
      • lotsofpulp 3y ago
        To get to the root cause, you have to go one level further. People (broadly speaking) want to live near people at least at their socioeconomic level, or higher than themselves. People want to live away from people below their socioeconomic level. At least for the purposes of their kids’ commingling in public schools. A society with greater differences between its members, whether it be due to skin tone, income, wealth, ethnicity, religion, language, etc, will result in more stratified development. Not necessarily, but apparently quite likely.
        • bobthepanda 3y ago
          I mean there is a housing crisis in egalitarian Scandanavia as well. In fact aside from Japan every single developed country has a housing crisis.
• tptacek 3y ago
  How does "not enough street parking" creating legal problems? Most of the north side of Chicago is mixed-use, medium-density, and street-parking reliant; it works fine (these are some of the most valuable and economically vital in the city).
  • bobthepanda 3y ago
    there is a common conception in America that there is a 'right' to parking availability, which is not really a thing anywhere else. in practice, 'not enough parking' often means 'not enough parking, that I am personally willing to pay for, in a location that I am willing to park in'. which could mean anything from 'all the spots are taken within a half mile' to 'I don't really want to pay for a $2 garage one block over because the street parking is free'
    • toast0 3y ago
      There's some sort of idea that everyone has to like what I like. Personally, I dislike paying for parking, and I dislike being in a setting thick with people and buildings... So I'm going to be out in the suburbs or exurbs or semi-rural and not bother you all in the urbs. Sometimes there is some reason for me to go into the city, and I'll try not to drive the whole way, because it will upset me when I have to pay for parking when I get there. But if that works, I think that's part of the point.
      • kasey_junk 3y ago
        I don’t think this is an issue of everyone needing the same preferences so much as a straight forward economic one. In the US we dramatically subsidize cars. One of those subsidies is free parking. That preference might not even be obvious if you don’t point out what are negative outcomes from that subsidy (for instance many progressives will demand parking mandates to get housing built, trading 1 real preference, equitable housing for one that they don’t prefer, cheap ice ownership).
      • bobthepanda 3y ago
        Taking parking minimums out of the zoning code is about not hoisting people's desire onto developers and people who buy or rent those units without using it, and requiring car owners to put their money where their mouth is.
• hibikir 3y ago
  Zoning in other countries is easy to visualize, even though it's completely alien to the Sim City ways: I recall being disappointed in the first game, and SC2000, because there was no way to make my home city. Residential zoning? My hometown doesn't have such designation at all, apartment buildings have commercial underneath in almost all cases, and office buildings and apartments end up sharing walls. Not that Sim City ever took traffic or parking even remotely seriously: Even in modern city builders, nobody attempts to represent the amount of space dedicated to surface lots in the US, because it'd look awful. It's always a fun exercise to, go to Google Maps, take a picture of the downtown of, say, St Louis, and then coloring every surface parking, or multi-level building solely dedicated to housing cars for commuters and sports events attendees: It's well over 30% of the surface area. Then people wonder why the city is dead after 5 pm
  • steveklabnik 3y ago
    > Not that Sim City ever took traffic or parking even remotely seriously Hilariously, it did: https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/9/4316222/simcity-lead-designer-stone-librande-talks-about-building-game https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/9/4316222/simcity-lead-desig... > "Our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots," SimCity lead designer Stone Librande says
  • silvestrov 3y ago
    My favorite example of this is how much of Apple's old HQ that is taken up by parking: http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&q=loc:37.332+-122.02964 http://maps.google.com/maps?t=k&q=loc:37.332+-122.02964 Compare size of parking to the size of office buildings, which even includes a nice green area that most business buildings don't have.
    • KptMarchewa 3y ago
      Property must be really cheap there to not even consider underground parking.
      • silvestrov 3y ago