171–180 of 209 posts
I don’t think the principle of hiding parking is necessarily bad though. Cohousing designs for this way to facilitate more interaction with neighbors. It’s just one aspect though among others (consensus management, etc.)
Correct it's no vibrant, bustling organic downtown. But it's still a helluva lot better than nothing at all. The suburbs I grew up in? There were a bunch of shitty strip malls, and a single indoor mall with a single food court with zero natural lighting, taken over by teenagers after school because it was literally the only place to congregate besides the parking lot outside the supermarket. There was no local "cente…
I hate to tell you, there is a place like this near where I live (Look up The Greene). I assure you, that place is effectively an outdoor mall. I rarely go there due to traffic in and out, I really dislike walking in it (drivers in there are in a hurry to park or leave, and have little concern for pedestrians, there is no "pedestrian only" space), and if I am going to a mall anyways, I would prefer an indoor mall whe…
Going outside at all is a hangover of a rapidly departing age. There's nothing out there anymore. Everything's in your home, except for food. Have it delivered, and you're solid. That just leaves commutes. Insofar as they're necessary, I agree with living in dense, hyperurban hive arcologies where everyone can walk to work/school.
Outside is gauche. It's jejune. Meanwhile, commuting's a necessary evil, and cars are one of the most dangerous and inefficient ways to do it. Update to the new meta or farm outmoded vanity betrayed by its sprawling, parking lot-shaped contradictions.
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> But while they might say they like those benefits, most people will choose the benefits of low density living, This is heavily dependent on one's conditioning. I grew up in a late mid-century low density suburb - nothing like the exurban sprawl you see today, but still very far from walkable. I instinctively moved from that to high density older neighborhoods as an adult. At least at the moment the trend tends to b…
>At least at the moment the trend tends to be towards demand for the benefits of increased density, as the culture has shifted to valuing experiences more than large (expensive-to-maintain) spaces. In the US, everyone in my circles acts the same way, until they have children. Then the priority becomes quality of school, which really means socioeconomic status of all the children in the school, which leads to the well…
I personally think that sucks (for the most part). But there are just a handful of cities where you can simultaneously satisfy the constraints of jobs, kids, decent schools, and reasonably priced housing. My wife and I couldn’t find anything in DC (we weren’t willing to spend $1.8 million on a house) so after years of living downtown, we finally bit the bullet and moved to the suburbs.
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I mean... are you dismissing the bad because there’s worse? My takeaway is that this kind of new development looks better (“movie set”) than what you describe, but it does not meaningfully change how people use and interact with the space and with each other. The hard part is building a living, breathing, functional and healthy community on a continent that’s been built from the ground up around cars. There are so ma…
Check out Montreal. It has a great downtown and decent public transit. It is also very walkable about 9 months a year.
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Sounds like you are moving the goal posts. If you said "less than average amount of middle class families per capita" then that is obvious. You said "almost no middle class people with kids" which is in my experience misleading and almost certainly false. Given the massive population of Manhattan, even if the percentages are as skewed as heavily as you believe they are, that means there is still a significant and vis…
You’re the one moving the goal posts. We were not talking about whether the population of families was significant “enough to support a large number of businesses.” I was replying to a post that suggested New York was an example of “a living, breathing, functional and healthy” urban community. By my reckoning, middle class households with kids are underrepresented by a factor of six in Manhattan. That’s is a hugely d…
Just as a matter of full disclosure, I feel that the absence of middle class families does not make an area any more unhealthy than the absence of, say, poor black families makes an area unhealthy. This is very much just a personal opinion here, but every demographic in a nation does not have to be proportionately represented in a community for that community to be "healthy".
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Yet people continue to walk around in those areas. There's masses of onstreet parking here in Berlin and not that much off street parking, but the footpaths are always crowded. It's the same in Melbourne - some parts have onstreet parking and lots of people, and some parts of only off street parking and few people. If getting people to walk between destinations is a goal, you should increase the proportion of on stre…
um walking why on earth did you jump to the conclusion, How do busses ambulances etc move through a city that has narrow streets crammed with cars. Of course with European city's with wide boulevards might not be as bad - though of course those wide streets are designed to stop barricades and to allow for the use of grape shot to stop the rioting presents.
I think he's barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn't "movie set urbanism", it's just boring, old "too much parking". Too much parking creates sparseness which reduces walkability. But putting parking behind stores ("movie sets") creates a human scale street space. While organic urban growth should be cherished, there are extreme cases, like most American towns and cities, where urbanism needs to be forcefully bo…
If you don't have of street parking you get congestion as people park on streets - that is the reason why planners mandate of street parking.
the important thing is to provide better alternative ways of getting around. eg walking from the nearest subway/tram/bus stop.
I think he's barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn't "movie set urbanism", it's just boring, old "too much parking". Too much parking creates sparseness which reduces walkability. But putting parking behind stores ("movie sets") creates a human scale street space. While organic urban growth should be cherished, there are extreme cases, like most American towns and cities, where urbanism needs to be forcefully bo…
Florida is almost entirely a place where you need a car to do anything. It is so absurdly spread-out that even driving at high speed on their high speed roads is a remarkably slow way to get anywhere. If people cannot park there, they cannot get there. Even if you built a real urban walkable neighbourhood with housing, stores, schools, offices, churches - a place where people could truly walk to all of their daily ne…
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Manhattan has almost no middle class people with kids. At most there are some upper middle class lawyers/bankers/programmers fighting it out over a handful of decent public schools. I don’t consider that functional or healthy. By age 45, 86% of Americans have had kids. Out of the remaining 14%, half say they wish they had kids. Just 5% say they don’t want kids—a number virtually unchanged from 1990. You can’t call an…
That's because there aren't enough Manhattans. A similar situation plays out in cities like London - a ton of people move out to raise families; historically it's been possible for the middle class to have children and live a few zones out, but it's getting much harder for anyone without inheritance. The problem is that there are very few cities that aren't either tiny, or endless car based sprawl.
> The problem is that there are very few cities that aren't either tiny, or endless car based sprawl.
not to be trite, but isn't "very few cities that aren't ... tiny" sort of definitional? england only has the population for 6 greater londons, if you crammed them all together. would spreading the population across six of them bring prices down enough for everyone to have the nice flat they want? how long would that remain the case?