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Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

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Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#311

Post by mikeshank »

modo_mario wrote: post #250
jhatemyjob wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people actually like cars/driving, some people dont want random people walking in front of their house, and not everyone wants their city to turn into NYC Sometimes it feels like the people on this site have only lived in SFBA/LA/NYC and nowhere else in the United States. Cars/suburbia work pretty well in most places

>Some people actually like cars/driving I live in a small town but in a very spread out relatively densely populated country. Still with the closing of the old bakery and little grocery store due to the people who ran it retiring I have to go to a nearby city or supermarkets on the outskirts for stuff. I'm not saying this out of spite or annoyance because of that. It's not that far. Hell i'm even moving soon. But I d…

>If you love driving you can do so without a reason.

At least for the time being.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#312

Post by nonford150 »

Kliment wrote: post #193
bananamerica wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is karate dojo death business? Do they kill a lot of people?

It's the kind of business that mops up empty commercial space, usually on a "until we find a better tenant" serial short-term rental agreement. See also kiosks, nail salons, vape shops, "outlets", pop-up shops etc.

In many US metro areas, these are the first types of tenants who move into small strip shopping centers along secondary roads running through smaller suburban towns and cities.

I'm in NE Atlanta metro; it seems that you can't pass a traffic light without seeing a nail salon, a gas station, a cell phone store, and Subway. And these have been there for years right from the building of the building.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#313

Post by bluGill »

bezmenov wrote: post #168
dgellow wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure about your argument of “you have to build up”. Lot of places in Europe have strict limits regarding how high a building can be and they do have lot of small stores around, Berlin, that you mentioned, is very strict on this. A few examples: Hamburg residential areas seem to have ~4-5 floors max. Groningen has neighborhoods where apartment building are limited to only 2 floors (So just two apartments). The…

~5 floors is as high as you can go before needing an elevator.

5 floors is also about the limit for wood frame construction, you need a more expensive building style to go higher. Obviously consult a civil engineer for details.

What this means in practice is you don't build between 6 and 10 floor buildings because the numbers won't work out. (obviously there are exceptions)

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#314

Post by pjc50 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #294
pjc50 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know anyone in this country, urban or rural dwelling, who can't walk to a shop or a pub The average walking distance to a pub has gone up a lot in recent years due to closure, and walking on rural roads at night where there is no footpath is horrendously dangerous even if you carry lights. It's a nice idyll but it's no longer really true. What you say about Simcity is absolutely true though. It doesn't corr…

AFAIK, there's no such thing in city planning as "Medieval mixed walkable". Rather, business of the same guild worked in close proximity, so that one wouldn't undercut the others (AKA a price cartel). It's why we have meatpacking districts etc. Maybe it's different in UK, though.

What I had in mind was places like Dubrovnik as an extreme example, or York as a less extreme - walled cities in which all the old residential/commercial activity happened. Necessarily dense and walkable. Smaller versions can be seen in "market towns" e.g. Cambridge: central square with occasional street market, surrounded by 2-4 storey buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments above. Some of which have been converted into offices.

There's a big split between European cities which decided to rebuild exactly as it was after they were bombed flat (or the few that largely escaped), versus those which decided to modernise and become car-oriented. Cambridge vs. Coventry.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#315

Post by stephencanon »

Spooky23 wrote: post #68
hirundo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teaching karate is a death business? In my limited experience the martial arts are overwhelmingly about defense and fitness. Making them predominantly a life business. A donut shop would be a better example of a death business.

Sorry, if you see a development with any vacancy, a martial arts place, and a subway/Chinese joint, that’s usually a dying development.

Unless it also has a DVD copying or vacuum repair shop, in which case it's a front for money laundering, and the other businesses are window dressing.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#316

Post by b112 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #297
b112 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless a 'Karen' can be an elderly aging Asian man, it's sexist, ageish and racist. Here's a few other such terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs A lot of these terms link specific behaviour, to specific ethnic/sex/cultural groups. I guess they're OK too? I find it utterly disgusting, that some people think some things are 'one way'. That racism is OK, but only "one way". Sexism is OK, but only ag…

For what it is worth I have seen Karen used as aggressively agender and aracially like referring to an obnoxious customer who was a black man as a "Karen".

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/karen/ https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Karen

Maybe you're seen this. I haven't, and many people seem to have the specific definitions listed above.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#317

Post by throwaway0a5e »

smoe wrote: post #43
aahhahahaaa wrote: post #13

How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years. Maybe the industrial revolution made cities too unpleasant? Were we too spoiled by the automobile industry and government roads? White flight from cities into the suburbs?

Never been to an US residential area and only "know" them from tv shows. Are they really pretty much completely devoid of businesses as this article indicates? No grocery / mom and pop stores, bars, restaurants, hair dressers etc.? That sounds very inconvenient. I always assumed you'd get some basic commercial everywhere.

For any given population density how the suburbs looks varies WILDLY based on the specific area and the economic/demographic situation since 1950.

In some places you'll have continuous miles of nothing but housing. In others it's an organic "spread out and up" from a core area. It basically comes down to what the local economy can support and the level of development that happened between 1865 and 1945.

Having hard cutoffs from "most residences are apartments/duplexes/multi-family, businesses on every corner" to "residences and residences only, 99% single family" to "tractors commonly seen on the road" is pretty distinct to the areas surrounding major cities that were formerly sparsely populated until they were built out rapidly in the 1950s through 1970s.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#318

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #275
impendia wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Karen isn't derogatory to women, it's only derogatory to Karens. I would dispute this point. The term is, at least, derogatory to women who are named Karen -- whether or not they are "Karens".

Being a Karen has nothing to do with your actual first name. What you're really doing there is showing why it isn't sexist even though it's implicitly female. The detail is only there for color, not as a core component of the archetype.

"Karen" is rooted in the stereotype of an over-bearing, entitled person in a customer service setting. Our prejudices tell us that person is probably a white soccer mom. So she gets a name we associate with the white soccer mom demographic.

You argue that "Karen" doesn't refer to whiteness, the middle-classes or the female gender - it just refers directly to the stereotype and therefore it's OK.

I invite you follow the same logic here.

Consider the stereotype of a gun-toting street gang member. Our prejudices may tell us that person is probably a young black male that lives in a big city. So he gets a name we associate with the young black urban male like "Deshawn" .

The logic is the same, yes?

If you're OK with "there goes Karen calling the cops on the Walmart clerk again", you should be OK with "there goes Deshawn shooting the neighborhood up again".

Are you?

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#319

Post by jessaustin »

pjc50 wrote: post #264
barnabee wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, "zoning" is just a bad idea. There's no such thing in the UK [1] and it still surprises me that it's quite a common approach. (As a kid I thought it was a game device employed to make urban planning in Sim City manageable. I still wonder if that series of games hasn't increased its prevalence.) Instead, in the UK you require 'planning permission' to change the land use of any building. This is d…

> I don't know anyone in this country, urban or rural dwelling, who can't walk to a shop or a pub The average walking distance to a pub has gone up a lot in recent years due to closure, and walking on rural roads at night where there is no footpath is horrendously dangerous even if you carry lights. It's a nice idyll but it's no longer really true. What you say about Simcity is absolutely true though. It doesn't corr…

...walking on rural roads at night where there is no footpath is horrendously dangerous...

Do you have to walk on the road? One might have expected that in rural areas one could walk through fields and forests.

Re: Put tiny businesses back into residential neighborhoods

#320

Post by bluGill »

refurb wrote: post #120
didip wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first guess would be the car lobbyists doing. They are powerful enough to tear down so many street-car rails all over America.

Makes for a nice conspiracy theory but from what I’ve read many of them were going under and consumers wanted cars, not street cars.

They went under because they were not allowed to raise fares to the level needed to support them this wasn't the market, it was the law.
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